


Overview Effect

by teethandstars



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Pseudoscience, F/M, Grounders in space, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-16 20:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11836344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teethandstars/pseuds/teethandstars
Summary: Stellar, stale air.[Canon divergence AU: Clarke and Roan are part of the group that makes it to space]





	Overview Effect

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galfridian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/gifts).



It was the sunrises and sunsets that seemed to truly astound the grounders.

“Fifteen,” Emori said to Murphy. “I counted yesterday.”

 _She sounds like a little girl_ , thought Clarke. She remembered being impressed by the single rise and set on Earth. Somehow, in less than a year Clarke grew used to solar days, days measured by light and shadow, by the sun and the stars. Of course the lack of days would be terrifying, exhilarating, to people who lived their entire lives under the sun.

Echo said nothing, but her eyes followed Raven's hands as she explained the speed and distance they were all spinning at now. Roan had his back to her (to all of them), turned fully toward the window of the viewing platform. Clarke couldn't read the line of his shoulders—tension, obviously, but fear? Regret? Wonder?

It didn't matter. The Earth was years away no matter how many days were compressed within a day. Roan would realize eventually.

  

 

When they first arrived, before they had even taken off the suits, they had gone through the Ark networks turning on filters and alarms and deleting code that would have was power attempting to command stations long fallen. The grounders and Murphy, who elected for ancient literature of all things instead of even the most basic of technological training, stood against the wall of the command room. Raven and Monty frantically combed through the mainframe and directed Clarke, Bellamy, and Harper through support tasks.

It must have been an hour. It felt like a hundred.

The sigh of relief when they were finally able to pull off their helmets was unanimous. Clarke caught Roan's eyes from across the console. She watched the way his nose flared and chest expanded. She saw the moment her tasted the air. His brows furrowed slightly, making his scars twitch.

Stellar, stale air.

 

 

Once the systems were running and after the algae vats were seeded there wasn't much to do.

Just like old times.

The algae produced quickly. The bloom vats stank throughout the entire ring for a few weeks until Raven and Bellamy managed to rig a closed system for the vat chambers. Clarke went through every scrap of anything she could find to create an inventory of the useful supplies that had inadvertently been left. She started to set up a medical bay. It took a couple days to admit that between the limited amount of medical supplies and the even more limited number of potential patients, a designated medical bay simply wasn't in practical.

So she was left to spend most of her time rattling around in their tin can, far above the world. 

Clarke was not the only one. 

 

 

There was deliberateness in every action. Clarke knew what she was doing, she knew what Roan was doing, and she could have stopped it.

Could have. Did not.

They kissed for a very long time. It wasn't particularly good kissing. It was too hard at times and too soft at others. Rage and relief. They were sloppy, not used to each other's faces. His stubble was just long enough to be abrasive. There was nothing kind between them any longer. 

And it was _fantastic_.  

 

 

Her father appeared framed in doorways or against windows with stars at his back. Wells was less obvious. He was just there, sometimes, when she turned too quickly or looked up. 

Their ghosts wandered this remaining part of Ark more in death than they ever did in life. Or possibly it was that they had finally managed to catch up with Clarke.

 

 

They kept to the twenty-four hour time measurement. On the Ark (rather, when the Ring was still the Ark), the schedule was based on Greenwich Mean Time. Since three of the eight survivors were Earthborn from the remains of what was once North America they had a meeting and voted to switch to Eastern Standard to keep Roan, Emori, and Echo closer to their original biorhythms.

That was another difference from the Ark. With only eight people, they were all council members, and they held council meetings every three nights.

It wasn't technically necessary they meet so often only to say "the engine is still working" and "the algae hasn't all died" but the former Skaikru remembered how sometimes people would break without warning. _Psychological effects of an environment not suited to humans_ , Abby called it. _Space crazy_ , the Ark children used to call it, giggling behind their hands like it was never going to happen to them some day. _We're all gonna go space crazy_. Like it wasn't horrifying. 

"We'll get back." Harper always phrased statements optimistically but rarely ever appeared optimistic herself.  "It's just a matter of time."

Clarke wanted to tell her that _everything_ was always only a matter of time. She opened her mouth to say it, thought better of it, bit the tip of her tongue and held that thought under it. 

Only Roan noticed. He watched her and said nothing.

In the artificial light his eyes appeared even paler than they were. Pale as the moon and twice as cold.

 

 

Roan hadn't spoken to Clarke since before the Conclave. The things they did to each other in empty corners of the Ring, or in the tiny room he had claimed near the oxygenator, or in the training gym when they were sure everyone else was occupied elsewhere--those were things they did _to_ each other. 

It wasn't about her. That much she knew.

Loneliness and proximity. In combination, they made Clarke and Roan seek each other out across the Ring. No longer friends and with no space for enmity, they became something that was neither. 

 

 

Clarke could see it all now: all the ways everything had gone wrong. The things she had done wrong. Maybe she changed, coming the the Ring. Maybe it was just easier to see it all from above and very far away. 

She'd known, on Earth, that her decisions had consequences. It had been a visceral sort of knowledge, all cortisol and nausea and the stubborn belief that she could push through it all. 

Distance, and time, had changed the way she felt things. Regret had burrowed down and nestled itself inside her, between her lungs, under her heart. 

Under her heart. Not in it. 

 

 

(At Becca's lab, among the glass and stark white gleaming, he said _You were born for this_ like it was a comfort, and maybe it was, and still she--)

   

 

Murphy and Emori took over the Chancellor's chambers. Murphy had been almost defiant about it. As if Clarke was an authority to be defied. His eyes narrowed and his pointy chin seemed even pointier when he announced it at her. And Clarke had only shrugged. The Chancellor's rooms were never hers. She didn't even want those rooms.

She already saw Wells or her father from the corner of her eyes five, ten, fifteen times a day. The Ring felt more and more like a giant (small, so small now she had seen they sky from below the clouds) echo of the Ark. 

 

 

Clarke realized one morning just before sunset that Azgeda and Skaikru no longer existed and never would again. It seemed obvious once she thought of it, but it hadn't really hit her. Not the way it must have occurred to the Earthborn (to Roan).

Maybe the names would survive, but they would never be as they once were.

For now they were all just floating.

Waiting. 

 

 

(Waiting for _what_? This was her life now.)

 

 

The ghosts of Wells and her father slipped through endless hallways, reflected in the metals, lingered just out of her line of sight until they brushed against her.

Clarke was pretty sure they weren't ever going away.

That was okay. She was learning to live with them.

  

 

Some days Clarke was just so giddily, absurdly _happy_ to be alive. She _made it_. Raven, Bellamy, Monty, Harper _made it_. Murphy, Emori, and even Echo _made it_.

Roan, her adversary, survived.Roan, her friend, lived.

The Earth burned like a star and they were all trapped in a circle they couldn't leave, not for years and years, but Clarke was _alive_. 

 

 

They were in Roan's room when Clarke told Roan the secret she had been holding in her mouth for months, ever since they had fled Earth. It had sat behind her teeth, under her tongue, stinging like a blister.

"I'm not sorry," Clarke said. "I'm not sorry and I'd do it again." 

Not sorry she was ever cast down to Earth. Not sorry for the death. Not sorry for the pain. 

Not sorry she betrayed him. 

And--

He smiled at her. He didn't frown or smirk. "No," Roan said, sadness and something else in his face--not forgiveness, but understanding? Acceptance, even? Or was she imagining it? "You aren't."


End file.
